Out With Textbooks, in With Laptops for an Indiana School District

Jason Crary, 13, with his classmates in Laura Norman's seventh-grade honors science class, taking a lesson on energy consumption on their laptop computers.Credit
Sally Ryan for The New York Times

MUNSTER, Ind. — Laura Norman used to ask her seventh-grade scientists to take out their textbooks and flip to Page Such-and-Such. Now, she tells them to take out their laptops.

The day all have seen coming — traditional textbooks being replaced by interactive computer programs — arrived this year in this traditional, well-regarded school district, complete with one naysaying parent getting reported to the police. Unlike the tentative, incremental steps of digital initiatives at many schools nationwide, Munster made an all-in leap in a few frenetic months — removing all math and science textbooks for its 2,600 students in grades 5 to 12, and providing a window into the hurdles and hiccups of such an overhaul.

The transformation, which cost $1.1 million for infrastructure, involved rewiring not just classrooms but also the mindset of students, teachers and parents. When teachers started hearing that “the server ate my homework,” they knew a new era had begun.

“The material we’re teaching is old but everything around it is brand-new,” said Pat Premetz, chairwoman of the math department at Wilbur Wright Middle School in Munster, who described the initiative as both “very overwhelming” and “the most exciting thing to happen in my 40 years of teaching.”

“This isn’t stressing out students,” Ms. Premetz added. “It’s stressing out teachers because of some of the technological problems, and parents who are wondering why their kids are on the computer so much.”

Munster is hardly the first district to go digital. Schools in Mooresville, N.C., for example, started moving away from printed textbooks four years ago, and now 90 percent of their curriculum is online. “It didn’t happen overnight for us — it was an incremental change,” said Mark Edwards, Mooresville’s superintendent of schools. “The competency is evolutional.”

But Munster’s is part of a new wave of digital overhauls in the two dozen states that have historically required schools to choose textbooks from government-approved lists. Florida, Louisiana, Utah and West Virginia approved multimedia textbooks for the first time for the 2011-12 school year, and Indiana went so far as to scrap its textbook-approval process altogether, partly because, officials said, the definition of a textbook will only continue to fracture.

“We’ve stopped pretending that the state board of education is the biggest school district in the state,” said Tony Bennett, Indiana’s superintendent of public instruction. “I believe in local control, and we don’t have the ability to be the keeper of knowledge we have been in the past. We’ll be better off if we uncuff people’s hands.”

Uncuffed, Angela Bartolomeo’s sixth graders spent a recent Wednesday rearranging terms of equations on an interactive Smart Board and dragging-and-dropping answers in ways that chalkboards never could. (In between, a cartoon character exclaimed that “Multiplying by 1 does not change the value of a number!” in his best superhero baritone.)

When the children followed up the lesson with exercises on their laptops, the curriculum, Pearson Education’s “Digits,” not only allowed them to advance at individual rates, but also alerted Ms. Bartolomeo via her iPad when they were stuck on a particular concept and needed help.

Software wirelessly recorded the children’s performance in a file that the teacher would review that night. “Last year I’d have to walk around and ask every kid how it’s going, and I’d be grading sheets, that kind of thing,” Ms. Bartolomeo said. “This way I can give my time to the kids who really need it. And it’s a lot more engaging for the kids. They’re actually doing their homework now.”

Ms. Norman, the seventh-grade science teacher, is using material from Discovery Education, which on that Wednesday included videos from Discovery’s “Mythbuster” series (commercial-free), an interactive glossary and other eye candy to help students investigate whether cellphones cause cancer. When Ms. Norman told the students to take out their ear buds to watch a video, two in the back yelped, “Cool!”

“With a textbook, you can only read what’s on the pages — here you can click on things and watch videos,” said Patrick Wu, a seventh grader. “It’s more fun to use a keyboard than a pencil. And my grades are better because I’m focusing more.”

Even as more and more schools nationwide have eschewed traditional textbooks, spending an estimated $2.2 billion on educational software last year, vigorous debate continues over whether technology measurably enhances achievement. But long before Munster will have a chance to reap any potential rewards, there has been a steep learning curve.

It was left to Maureen Stafford, Munster’s director of instructional programs and assessment, to convince skeptical colleagues (some of whom did not want to relearn how to teach) and parents (some of whom did not want their children to be exposed to the online wilderness) that the switch could be made in a matter of months. The town contributed about half of the $1.1 million to build the wireless infrastructure in the district’s three elementary schools, middle school and high school, with district funds covering the rest.

Each student was issued a laptop, with an annual rental fee of $150. The computers are cut off from noneducational Web sites, including social networks. The children are not allowed to use any other computer for their work because, she said, “kids on the south end of town will have Cadillacs and others on the north end will have eBay versions. That’s not equitable.”

Some parents balked at the expense and risk, even though the fee is the same as what the district had long been charging for textbooks, and includes insurance. Then there were the Luddites: one father sent so many nasty e-mails to Ms. Stafford that she reported him to the police for, fittingly, cyber-harassment. (He ceased and desisted.)

There were the inevitable technical glitches. One girl in Ms. Norman’s class missed the video because she could not connect to the network, so she had to catch up in the Media Center (formerly known as the library). During a contentious meeting with a Pearson representative, several math teachers complained of assignments disappearing, tests not saving, and network failures lasting hours while students struggled to get online for homework.

“We have no record of any outages at that time,” the Pearson representative, Chuck Dexter, explained as the teachers grew angrier. “That’s what we need to figure out.”

Ms. Stafford, 62, has long planned to retire in 2013, and noted in an interview that it would have been far easier for her, and many others in Munster, to stay with print textbooks for another few years. But when Indiana made multimedia an option, she felt she had no other.

“This wasn’t a technology initiative — this was a curriculum initiative,” Ms. Stafford said. “The best programs out there needed the technology required to implement it. It was time.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 19, 2011, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Out With Textbooks, In With Laptops for an Indiana School District. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe